Those involved in Euroclassica have an interest in the way Classics plays a part in traditions other than our own national one.  Classics in the Caribbean is such a case.  Because of its colonial associations with Europe and the imposition of a European culture through educational institutions this is a problematic tradition.  Derek Walcott, the poet and writer from St Lucia, is examined in this book as the leading example of this tension between the ancient Mediterranean world and the modern Caribbean in his literary and critical works.  For classicists his best-known work is Omeros, an epic creation in English where characters from his island assume epic roles in a canvas including the old and new worlds.  The collected poems also contain many examples of Walcott’s struggle to find an authentic voice of his own which can include the patois of his fellow islanders and the acquired literature and languages of the ancient European world, for example ‘A Latin Primer’ in The Arkansas Testament 1988.

            McConnell analyses Walcott’s work in the context of postcolonial critical theory, distinguishing three phases of his reception of Classical themes: temporality and simultaneity, syncretism, and re-naming and re-creating.  Syncretism is a difficult concept and is best seen in the works themselves but is summed by McConnell as the way Walcott “celebrates the multiple roots of the Caribbean (European, African, Asian and Indigenous) as inextricably entwined” leading to a new Caribbean culture.  Among the key works here are ‘The Schooner Flight’, Omeros, and the stage works The Odyssey: A Stage Version and Ti-Jean and his Brothers.  Walcott’s work is open to the criticism of Eurocentricity and derivative lack of originality, but he has justified his approach in his theoretical works. Walcott himself was aware of this criticism and that his work can be viewed as problematic, but he is open about it.  He himself is critical, as one of his poems ends ‘Our myths are ignorance, theirs are literature’; he often denied that Omeros was an epic and ‘A Latin Primer’ is scarcely complimentary about his time as a Latin teacher.  Yet in spite of all this, Classical themes pervade his work and rather than being slavish imitations of the past are creating a new modernity.  Rather than being a follower, Walcott is to be seen as a modern Homer (and Virgil, Dante and Joyce) whose work encompasses many worlds.

            Walcott’s island of St Lucia was subject to impacts from the British and French colonial powers and so the influence of the English and French languages and their literatures is present throughout his work.  The critical analysis of postcolonial theory carried out by McConnell throughout is based on both anglophone and francophone thinkers, so though Walcott writes in English there is already a wider European context to his work.

            McConnell arranges the book into three chapters (Time, Syncretism, Re-creation) each dealing with an aspect of Walcott’s thinking.  Close readings of many of the major works are included in each chapter.  In the chapter on Time, McConnell shows how Walcott’s characters and settings seem to exist in more than one time, creating a simultaneity of the ancient and modern worlds.  The other two show how the elements of all literary and cultural traditions combine in his poetic, dramatic and critical writings and finally how this productive friction leads to a re-creativity that incorporates Caribbean, African, ancient Greco-Latin and Judaeo-Christian cultures, speaking to the world.  Walcott’s oeuvre is extensive, and readers may well need a library to consult full texts of the works quoted and examined, especially some of the poetry which is only available in the original collections.

            The writing is often dense and theoretical, and the book requires at least a basic knowledge of Walcott’s major works, but those interested in the extension of Classical reception beyond Europe and into new worlds and in its continuing and renewed global influence, will find much to reflect on here.

John Bulwer